A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-Yo, Silver! ...

Three times a week on the radio, those words, juxtaposed with the galloping strains of Rossini's "William Tell" overture, captivated generations of mid-century Americans.

For a decade, first on the radio and later on television, Fred Foy was the man who intoned those gallant lines, among the most evocative in American broadcasting.

Foy died on Wednesday, at 89, at his home in Woburn, Mass. The death, of natural causes, was confirmed by his daughter Nancy Foy.

Foy was not the first "Lone Ranger" announcer and narrator -- the show had begun in 1933, when he was scarcely more than a boy -- but he was the last, and almost certainly the best known. From the late 1940s, when he joined the radio show, until the late 1950s, when the TV show went off the air, his was the resonant voice that heralded thrills, adventure and the swift administration of frontier justice by that masked man.

"We had no idea we were creating something that would become an American icon," Foy told The Daily News of New York in 2003. "We knew it was good, but it was a job. You came in at 3, you checked the script, you did the rehearsal, you made sure the production elements were in place, you went on the air."

On the radio, Foy was also the announcer for "The Green Hornet" and "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon." On television, he became a staff announcer for ABC in New York, where his duties included "The Dick Cavett Show."

A frequent speaker at old-time radio conventions, Foy was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2000.

Frederick William Foy was born in Detroit on March 27, 1921. (He was no relation to the vaudevillian Eddie Foy Sr. or his Seven Little Foys.) Soon after graduating from high school, he took a job with WMBC, a local 250-watt radio station. In 1942 he joined WXYZ in Detroit, the station on which "The Lone Ranger" originated.

Serving in the Army in World War II, Foy was an announcer for Armed Forces Radio in Cairo. After the war he returned to WXYZ. There, beginning in 1948, he narrated "The Lone Ranger" live in the studio.

Foy remained with the show until it went off the radio in the mid-1950s; he announced the television version from its inception in 1949 to its demise in 1957. (During the years in which the radio and TV shows overlapped, Foy was heard on both.)

He played the part of the Lone Ranger exactly once, when Brace Beemer, who acted the role on radio, came down with laryngitis.

"I guess I did all right," Foy told The Daily News in 2003, "because we didn't get any complaints."

Besides his daughter, Foy's survivors include his wife, the former Frances Bingham, whom he married in 1947; another daughter, Wendy Foy Griffis; a son, Fritz; and three grandchildren.

Though "The Lone Ranger" enjoyed a prolonged afterlife in television reruns, Foy received no extra compensation, because his work was done in the era before mandatory residuals.

He did not seem to mind, Nancy Foy said Wednesday. So proud was Foy of his association with the show that to the end of his life he recited its introduction for anyone who asked.